


If At First You Don't Succeed

by sara_wolfe



Series: Fifty First Dates [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-28
Updated: 2012-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-31 20:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sara_wolfe/pseuds/sara_wolfe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve stared at him in silence for several, long seconds. "Did you just use 'marriage' and 'us' in the same sentence?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	If At First You Don't Succeed

As it turned out, Danny was the one who spend the night in the hospital, getting the hole in his shoulder patched up. After admonishing his partner not to take any stupid risks, he'd gone and gotten himself shot, during their insane Butch and Sundance rush of the idiots robbing the restaurant. He hadn't even noticed, at first, what with the adrenaline pumping through his veins, but after they'd handed the would-be criminals off to the HPD, the burning pain radiating from his arm had started to make its presence known.

And, of course, Steve's reaction had been to immediately bundle him into the Camaro and drive to the hospital even faster than his usual breakneck speed, even though Danny had assured him that he wasn't bleeding _that_ badly. (Danny also realized that he would have done the same thing, if his role, and Steve's, had been reversed, and he wondered if it was good or bad that he'd apparently rubbed off on Steve so much.)

Steve had stormed into the ER, dragging a still-protesting Danny by the good arm, and he'd bullied the nurses into getting Danny into an exam room. Unfortunately, that was where Steve's influence had ended, and even invoking 5-0 and the Governor hadn't been enough to get a doctor into see Danny any faster. Which meant that they'd been cooling their heels in the exam room for forty-five minutes, and Steve was starting to get impatient. 

_'Maybe 'starting to' isn't the right phrase,'_ Danny thought, watching as Steve paced the confines of the small room like a caged tiger. _'Steve looks like he's about to explode.'_

"You could always sit down," he offered, but Steve barely spared the rickety-looking chair in the corner a glance before he resumed his circuit. Danny watched him pace for a few more minutes, barely holding his own impatience in check, before he sighed loudly to get Steve's attention. "Okay, I'll bite," he said, when his partner stopped pacing and looked over at him. "What's going on with you?"

For a few seconds, he didn't think that he was going to get an answer, but then Steve stared down at his shoes, muttering something under his breath that Danny couldn't hear.

"I didn't catch that," he prompted, encouragingly, and Steve sighed. 

"You got shot," he repeated himself, louder this time. 

"Yes, I did," Danny agreed. "And I'm lucky that the idiot holding the gun was a bad shot, because the bullet isn't that deeply embedded in my shoulder."

"But, you still got shot," Steve insisted, a mulish expression on his face. "You shouldn't get shot, you have Grace-"

Danny held up a hand to forestall any further arguments, knowing exactly what Steve was getting at. 

"Okay, stop right there," he said, talking right over Steve's objections. "First of all, I am a cop, and I knew the risks when I took the job, including getting shot. They are risks I will gladly take to protect the people I've sworn my life to. Second, I am your partner, which makes us equals, both at work and in this relationship, and which means that you don't get to wrap me up in cotton, like I suspect you dearly want to, right now. And third, if this relationship of ours goes the way I expect it to, Grace is going to be as much yours as she is mine, which means that you don't get to throw the 'single dad' card at me, because we're both going to be parents in our weird little marriage."

Steve stared at him in silence for several, long seconds. "Did you just use 'marriage' and 'us' in the same sentence?" he finally asked. 

"That is what you took away from that little speech?" Danny demanded, incredulously. 

"No, I got the rest, too," Steve assured him, a strange look on his face. "You'll kick my balls into my throat if I try to play the caveman."

"Oh, good," Danny snarked, "you can read between the lines."

"Yeah," Steve agreed. "So, am I reading the whole 'marriage' thing, correctly?"

"Would you drop the marriage thing?" Danny exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air and wincing at the way the movement pulled at his shoulder. "Forget I said anything about marriage!"

"Oh, no," Steve said, with a laugh. "You brought it up. You, Danny Williams, want to marry me!" This last was said with a cat-who-ate-the-canary smirk, and, of course, the doctor had to walk in at that, exact moment. Steve took one look at the flabbergasted look on Danny's face and burst out laughing.

To his credit, the doctor didn't even blink at the comment. Danny wondered if that said more about the doctor's unflappable personality, or about his and Steve's reputations on the island. He was also pretty sure he didn't want to know the answer. 

"Detective Williams," the doctor started, "according to your x-rays, the bullet didn't travel too far into your shoulder. It appears to be lodged into your deltoid, and will be a relatively simple matter to get it out."

"Define relatively simple," Danny retorted. 

"We can do the extraction with a local anesthetic," the doctor assured him. "Don't worry; this won't take long at all."

The next half-hour was filled with white-knuckled tension on both Danny and Steve's parts. Danny wouldn't have been surprised to find that Steve was holding as tightly to his hand as he was to Steve's. But, finally the bullet was out, and Danny relaxed his death-grip on Steve's hand, flexing the feeling back into his fingers while the doctor bandaged his shoulder.

When he was done, the doctor wrote Danny a prescription for pain meds, and then he left them alone in the room. Steve helped Danny get his shirt back on, easing the sleeve over his injured shoulder, carefully, and then being just as gentle with his coat. 

"Well," he remarked, as they left the hospital and headed for Danny's car, "this has been one hell of a first date."

"Oh, no," Danny said, quickly, surprising Steve into looking at him. "This was not our first date. First dates do not involve shootouts, or visits to the hospital, or bullet wounds."

"Ours do," Steve muttered, under his breath, and Danny smacked him on the arm with his good hand. 

"We didn't even get to have dinner," he reminded Steve. "No. We are going to do this, again, and we are going to do it, right, next time."


End file.
